It would be easy to scorn Oz the Great and Powerful for trampling on the legacy of a beloved American movie. But the nostalgia approach is unnecessary. This generic hodgepodge of fairy tale clichés and garish CGI falls flat on its own terms.

Leading the slog is James Franco, who does for Oz what he did for the Oscars in 2011. Prancing about a Disneyfied magical kingdom with a wincing grin perpetually on the verge of a smirk, Franco has difficulty making even a self-professed con man seem whole. You get the feeling he either doesn’t know what movie he’s in or doesn’t particularly care.

In his defense, you can hardly blame him. The first half of Oz, in which Franco’s sham small-town magician gets sucked into a tornado and crash lands his hot air balloon in a candy-colored wonderland, presents a master class in how not to get a story off the ground. Our charlatan enchanter meets a wide-eyed, well-dressed lass (Mila Kunis) who claims to be a witch. He encounters a benevolent flying monkey (sacrilege!) voiced by Zach Braff, and a spunky china doll (Joey King). They walk. They discuss the need for a wizard to save the kingdom from a wicked witch. They banter for easy laughs. Then they walk some more.

By the time a second witch (Rachel Weisz) appears, and then a third (Michelle Williams), Oz has gotten nowhere and not particularly fast. We’re supposed to connect to the ersatz wizard’s sense of guilt — heavy lies the heart that wears the fraud — but Franco plays the part like a walking air quote. He never comes close to inviting us in.

The saddest part of all this is the identity of the director. Sam Raimi has been a visionary filmmaker with the range to excel at everything from tongue-in-cheek horror (the original Evil Dead movies) to rural noir (the sublime A Simple Plan). The mandates of digital spectacle brought him down with the third Spider-Man movie, but that was already a fatigued franchise. With Oz he gets knocked cold by a falling tent pole and consumed by the rhythms and shallow aesthetics of what currently passes for blockbuster filmmaking. Say it ain’t so, Sam.

Fleeting moments of enchantment keep the eyes open in fits and starts, including a finale that brings a new twist to the classic man-behind-the-curtain chicanery and pays homage to the pioneers of early cinema. But the visual wonder is cheapened by shoddy 3-D — there’s rarely another kind — that blurs background motion and traffics in the tired gimmick of dangerous objects flying through the screen.

Oz the Great and Powerful somehow manages to be both slavish to its hallowed template (when convenient) and completely tone-deaf to the magic that made it a one-of-a-kind cultural milestone. That’s a not-so-neat trick. It’s also the primary form of black magic practiced by this royal scam.

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